A journal about my personal thoughts regarding evolving a comprehensive social media strategy at a large company.

November 10, 2008

An Object Lesson On The Value Of Social Media Proficiency

I still see many companies out there furiously searching for the magical "ROI" that will create the case for investing in social media proficiency.

Cynically, though, the very fact that they're looking for an ROI silver bullet that will somehow magically convince naysayers and other risk-adverse types is an oxymoron in itself, IMHO.

So, let me share the news. Today, we used our social media machine to accomplish something big and visible that we just couldn't have done any other way.

A Bit Of EMC Context ...

EMC makes advanced technology products and services that help people manage information better.

Like any high-tech company, we spend a lot of money on R+D, occasionally coming up with entirely new concepts in the industry. As an example, this morning, we publicly announced an entirely new form of "cloud optimized storage" that represents some seriously progressive thinking.

But it's one thing to come up with something revolutionary, it's another thing to tell everyone about it in such a way that you extract full economic value.

I used to run EMC's product marketing group many years ago, and -- back then -- when we came up with something very new and interesting, the only real channel we had to "spread the news" was to issue a press release, and then schedule days of concalls with reporters and analysts in the hopes that they'd agree with us on what we found so interesting, and write a short piece on the topic.

I did this more times than I care to remember.

Since these people were the only game around for getting the news out, they could be indifferent or difficult or obstinate in how they treated your "news". Fail to convince them that the world cared about this topic, or scratch their back in some other way, and you'd fail to accomplish your objectives.

All that investment in R+D and innovation failing to get properly monetized simply because you couldn't do a good job of getting the word out. From a business person's perspective, that really sucked.

Things are different now.

Using EMC's Blogging Corps

We've now got a small army of EMC bloggers who are very proficient outside the firewall. They write well, cover things from an interesting perspective, and are each "followed" by many in the industry.

We made sure they were pre-briefed on the announcement, and had access to internal materials that weren't part of the general announcement.

We made the product teams directly available for the bloggers to interview and ask questions.

We "teased" the marketplace by putting clues and bread crumbs out there without giving away the whole story.

We internally circulated drafts of our proposed posts to make sure they were somewhat accurate, consistent and non-overlapping.

All of this happened rather organically and naturally. There wasn't a lot of drama and anxiety.

The results?

Perhaps one of the most effective "big idea" launches I've seen anywhere in our industry, ever.

Completely unachievable with a "1.0" approach, I might add. Even if we spent the money to rent a big auditorium, flew people in for the day, etc. -- it would not have been anywhere as effective as what we did, period.

Yes, the engineering team came up with the "big idea" and made it a deliverable product. But our new approach to getting the word out made that investment pay off much better and much faster than ever before.

Looking for ROI?

The existence of our EMC blogging corps was probably worth tens of millions of dollars for this one event, and achieved a level of impact that couldn't be done even if we could have spent all that money.

How Did This Come To Be?

Easy.

We thought having a cadre of effective external bloggers was damn important, and we invested in getting what we thought we needed.

No one thing, a lot of little things:

We made it "OK" to blog externally. We created external blogging guidelines (not "rules" or "policy") in the input of our bloggers.

We created a lightweight governance function in the event that our guidelines needed clarification or application to a particular circumstance.

We created an internal support group of people who were either blogging externally, or wanted to. We gave people encouragement and coaching.

We asked our PR organization to embrace and leverage our external bloggers, and change how they did things sliightly.

We gave people an internal platform to practice (EMC|ONE) their blogging skills in a safe environment.

The bloggers brought the passion and expertise, though.

We just harnessed it.

A Retrospect

All of the above has been in place for a while. It's now a natural part of how we do business in the marketing world. We know it's there, and how to use it effectively. Since I'm at the center of all of this, it's nice to read another perspective.